I’ve been a fan of Meebo for awhile now. I love the fact that I can use all my Instant Message Accounts (MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL/AIM, and Jabber/GTalk) all on one webpage. It’s a very slick site and gets better every week. If you use Instant Messaging and have to keep track of many contacts and accounts, it is a must-have (and it’s free). While many people only use one Instant Message platform, like AIM or MSN, if you network at all internationally, you quickly discover the regional preferences; while AIM is massively popular in the US, most Europeans prefer MSN Messenger. Many techies prefer Jabber, or Google’s Jabber client GTalk. It’s fairly easy to collect contacts using all the major Instant Messaging platforms fairly quickly.

This week they released an incredible new product, their ‘Meebo Me’ service. Meebo Me is a flash application that you place on your website, blog, MySpace, etc… that allows visitors to those pages to chat directly with you through Meebo. This allows potential customers, clients, readers and fans to communicate in real-time with you through your site. Meebo Me communicates directly to your Meebo Account and doesn’t use, or show, your Instant Message account contact information (i.e. Noone’s going to find out your AIM name unless you tell them ). This ‘privacy’ aspect is a great side benefit for many website publishers as it leaves the Instant Messaging access completely up to you. If you don’t have time to chat, you can simply go offline or ‘Away’ and be contacted no more.

Meebo’s client is a feature-rich (and richer and richer each release) instant messenger replete with all of the features people have grown accustomed to: buddy lists, emoticons/smilies, sounds and group chats. You can also set your online status to ‘Hidden’, preventing other users from seeing that you are online. This is common for some Instant Message clients, but is a welcome addition for AIM users. In most AIM clients, if you can even hide yourself, you also cannot see who is on. By leaving your status set to ‘Hidden’, you can choose with whom and when you are available to chat, thereby avoiding the Time Suck™ that often comes from too much time spent IMing.

When used properly, Instant Messaging is an extremely powerful networking and connectivity tool. Meebo simply makes it better.

Tags: Meebo, Instant Messenging, Instant Messenger, AIM, AOL, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, GTalk, iChat, IM, Ajax, Web 2.0